Don’t Forget to Use Your Penguin

In my first-year writing class we are doing a copyediting workshop. My students have exchanged papers and I have asked them to do the following:

  1.  Make sure all Direct Quotations have been introduced properly.
  2. Check to make sure the in-text citations have been done according to MLA format.
  3. Check each entry in the Works Cited page to make sure it has been formatted according to MLA.

I have also asked them to bring their handbooks. This year we are using The Little Penguin Handbook.  As my students work I circulate. “If you have any questions let me know,” I say. We are at the point in the semester where I feel a bit useless in class. I set my students to work—writing, peer reviewing, copyediting—and they spend the class working. At the beginning of the semester they seemed to have a lot of questions, but now that we are near the end and they know what they are doing,  they have fewer and fewer questions.

But today someone raises her hand and like the good teacher I am I rush right over.  “Should this be in quotations or in italics?” she asks pointing to the title of a journal article.

“In quotation marks,” I say. “Titles of articles are in quotation marks and titles of journals and books are in italics.”

“Thanks,” the student says.

I start to circulate again. I’m happy to be of use! Another student raises his hand. Again, like the good teacher I am, I rush right over.

“Should there be a comma here?” he asks pointing to the in-text citation.

“No,”  I say. “No comma between the author’s name and the page name.”

“Thanks,” he says.

Another student raises his hand. Again I rush right over. I’m actually teaching!  “Is this right?” he asks pointing to an in-text citation.  “She is quoting from an article that has no author. But don’t you have to put the author’s name in the citation?”

“If there is no author you put the name of the article in the citation. What you are doing is pointing the reader to the Works Cited page so they can easily find the source.”

“Thanks,” my student says.

Once again I begin making my rounds around the class. But this time I notice something. My students, being the good students that they are, have brought their Little Penguins to class. But not one student has opened the handbook. Everyone is checking the in-text citations and Works Cited page from memory.

“Remember,” I say. “You need to use your Penguins to check the in-text citations. Use your handbook to check the Works Cited page.”

A couple of students look up at me and open their handbooks. The rest just keep reading.

And then I realize I’m not the great teacher I think I am. 

At the beginning of the semester when I introduced the handbook I told my students that handbooks are not meant to be read from cover to cover, but are meant to serve as a reference. “Use your handbook to look things up. If you are unsure about how to use a semi-colon look it up.” 

When we started our unit about documenting sources I stressed to my students that I am not going to teach them MLA. “What you want to remember is that every field requires a particular style format. What you need to do is to determine from your audience what style format is required and then know how to use your handbook to look up the conventions of that particular style. You don’t need to commit any of this to memory. You just need to know how to use your handbook.”

Why am I modeling to my class exactly what I don’t want them to do? Why do I do this?

I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that through years of teaching first-year writing and years of writing academic papers I have memorized some of the finer points of MLA documentation. I’m not sure I’m completely proud of this fact, but it has happened. I do know what is supposed to be in italics, what is supposed to be in quotation marks, and the order of all the publication information.  So when a student asks me a question it is easy for me to tell him/her what the answer is.

But there is a danger here. Due to the increasing availability of sources online, all style formats are changing. A few years ago it was required to put the online source’s web address as part of the publication information. MLA no longer requires the web address; rather MLA requires that you indicate whether the source is “Print” or “Web.” Things are changing and the finer points of MLA that I have committed to memory may no longer be accurate. In other words I should be using my Penguin too.

And, I hate to admit it, but sometimes I fall into the trap of proving that I do actually know something. As a writing teacher I usually don’t give a lot of straight answers.  When a student asks, “Can we use ‘I’ in this paper?” I will say, “What do you think your audience expects? What would be the effect of using ‘I’ in this paper?” When a student asks me what something means in an essay we are reading I will say, “What do you think it means?”  So when a student asks me if a title needs to be in italics or quotation marks, I sometimes jump at the chance to give a straight answer.

But is this helping the students learn what they really need to learn?

So when another student raises her hand, I rush right over. “Is this how you do a block quote?” I rush right over. But rather than pointing out that block quotations don’t use quotation marks, I say, “I don’t know. Let’s see what our Penguin handbook says.”  And then together we turn to the section on block quotations.

Why Don’t They Talk?

This semester I’m teaching first-year writing in our computer lab. I like the way the lab is set up. We have a large seminar type table in the middle of the room and the computers are all along the walls. This is great because we can be at the table away from the computers for certain parts of the class  (discussions, announcements, introducing activities) and then the students can be in front of the computers when they are writing. It works.

But the last couple of times I have taught in the computer lab I have noticed something. When we are sitting around the table having a whole class discussion things seem to go a little slow. Sometimes the discussion starts off fine, but then it seems to quickly die out until eventually there is silence.  I don’t know why, but the silence in a class discussion is not only the most uncomfortable silence in the world, but it seems to go on forever.  I’ve done all kinds of things to try to prevent this from happening. We’ve had a discussion about what makes a good class discussion, I’ve called on people, I’ve had them freewrite first and then discuss what they have written, but the end result is always the same. I ask a question and wait until someone answers. I ask another question and then wait.

And here is another thing. When I ask the students to do small group work, they talk up a storm, even when I come by and hover over their group. But when I bring them back to the table they become quiet.

One day this semester I finally asked the students what was going on. “Why is it,” I said, “that when you are in small groups you yak away and then when you come back to the table you’re quiet?” They all laughed and no one said anything. One student finally said, “Maybe when we’re at the table we think we’re supposed to be serious.”

Maybe.

But I’m wondering if something else is going on. A couple of times after the class discussion has died out I’ve asked the students to go to the computers to post and respond to one another on the online forum. They start typing and they don’t stop. The room becomes filled with the clicking of the keyboards. They can’t seem to say enough. And what they have to say is great—thoughtful, insightful, and interesting. Clearly they are thinking and making connections. They are saying the kinds of things on the online forum that I always hope they would say in a class discussion.

So why don’t they?

Recently I heard a Fresh Air interview with Sherry Turkle  from MIT who researches digital culture. The interview was fascinating! One of the points she made was that people, and particularly people of our students’ generation would rather text than talk on the phone. With texting they can control the conversation, they can think about what they would like to say and they can construct how they would like to say it before they say it. Talking on the phone (i.e. speech) doesn’t enable them to do that. They have to respond without the chance to think about their response. They also run the risk of making a mistake, of saying something wrong.

On the surface this may seem that we could blame the digital age for “ruining” our students’ ability to engage in a class discussion. But, I’m not sure about that. I remember as an undergraduate (and this was well before the digital age) that I was hesitant to participate in a class discussion because I was afraid of making a mistake. I just didn’t think I was quick enough to formulate what and how I wanted to say something.  I was afraid of bumbling, of mixing up my words, of sounding like someone who didn’t know what I was talking about.

I’m wondering if we need to think about class discussions in a different way. Maybe we are asking too much from these class discussions. We are asking students to construct thoughtful and insightful responses to our questions and to perfectly articulate these responses within the space of a minute or two. This seems like a lot. No wonder my students hesitate before answering. 

So maybe we need to step back and think about what we really want from class discussions. If we want our students to share what they are thinking and to think and respond to one another, maybe we actually need to give them the space and time to do that.  An online forum gives them that space. They can read, reflect, and then construct a response. Before hitting submit, they can read their responses, they can make sure they are saying what they intend. In other words, they can control what they are saying and how they are representing themselves in the discussion.

 Now I’m not saying that we should forgo with class discussion all together. I think there are moments in the classroom when class discussions should be used. But maybe we should think a bit more about what are our objectives for this classroom staple and think about when and how they can be the most effective. Sometimes it might be best to have the classroom filled with clicking keys than awkward silences.  

 So should we imagine a writing class with no class discussion? Any thought?

Banning Topics

As a writer and English teacher I’m against banning books. And my colleagues are too. But when it comes to banning topics for any kind of “research” type paper, we find ourselves a bit conflicted. Regardless of what it is called – the documented essay, the research paper, the source paper, or as we call it here in the Writing Program the “Adding to the Conversation” paper there is a lot of talk about banning certain topics. Let’s be honest, we’ve all read our fair share of papers on legalizing marijuana, abortion rights, lowering the drinking age, and stem cell research. And probably there isn’t anything really new or interesting that a first-year student can say about any of these topics. We’ve read it all. Since we have to read these papers most of us would like to read something new, something a bit more interesting about a topic we actually don’t know too much about. One semester I had a student write about how damaging wearing high heels are. I assumed they were bad, but I had no idea how much damage high heels could do to someone’s feet. It was fascinating.

Another argument for banning topics is that if we remove these tired old topics from the students they will be forced to find something more interesting to write. Students gravitate towards these typical topics because they think research papers are supposed to be about arguing for or against something—you can argue for legalizing marijuana, you can argue against the death penalty.

Banning topics isn’t just something those of us teaching composition do. At an AWP Conference (Associated Writing Program—the national organization for creative writing programs) I attended one year, the keynote speaker spoke about how she banned her introductory creative writing students from writing stories about their conflicts with their roommates, and the death of a friend and/or family member. Like those of us teaching the research paper, this creative writing teacher wanted to read something more interesting and if she felt that if banned these usual first stories, her students would have to find something else to write about. And usually that something else would become a much more interesting story.

This all makes sense. Good things can come from banning topics. But then I remembered something. The first story I ever submitted to a fiction writing workshop was about the death of my college roommate. I’m sure it wasn’t the most exciting story the workshop leader ever read and it wasn’t the best story I ever wrote, but it was a story I had to write at that time. And I learned something from writing that story.

And this helps me remember something else. The students aren’t writing their “Adding to the Conversation” papers for me to learn something new. They are writing these papers to learn something about the purpose of research. And if we think students learn best by being invested in their topics, we need to remember that legalizing marijuana and lowering the drinking age may actually be topics our first-year students are interested and invested in. We need to remember where the students are. The topics that we may feel are typical and tired may be new to our students and may actually be the issues they are thinking about. Our students may also have something at stake in learning more about the topics we are tired of reading about. One semester I had a student who wanted to research stem cell research because he had a family member who had Parkinson’s and he wanted to know if stem cell research could provide his dad with a cure. As a result he was able to add a personal element to the paper as well as learn something about an issue that was important to him.

So maybe there is another way. I try to lead my students through a range of generative writing exercises that enable a range of topics to emerge—hopefully some topics my students didn’t think they could write about—like high heels. And after my students have selected a potential topic I ask them why. Why do you want to write about the legalization of marijuana? Why are you interested in lowering the drinking age? If the answer is because they think they can find enough information about the legalization of marijuana to write a paper, maybe they should be steered away from that topic. But if their answer is because a family member needs marijuana for medical reasons or their roommate binge drinks every Thursday night, these just may be topics they are invested in. And hopefully their investment will come through their writing. So maybe banning topics isn’t the answer. Maybe asking why is.

Driving Lessons

This summer I took on the task of teaching my step-daughter how to drive a standard shift car. Cara had been driving for several years already, but always a car with an automatic transmission. Since her father traded the car she had been driving for a standard shift car, she had to either learn how to drive this new car or learn the bus schedule. Since she was using my car until she learned either of these things, we thought it would be best to give her a deadline. I also wanted my car back.

We began our lessons driving around the roads of the small town where we live –roads with no stop lights and little traffic. We drove around practicing starting and stopping, making left and right hand turns and backing up. As we drove we discussed the importance of being able to drive a standard transmission. Well, this isn’t completely accurate. There really wasn’t a lot of discussing going on. Cara kept saying, “Why would anyone want to drive a standard?” “Why don’t they make all cars automatics?” “Why do I have to learn?” and I kept saying, “This way you’ll be able to drive any car.” “People like to drive standards because they feel they have more control.” “You’ll appreciate it in the winter when you will be able to downshift.” I did feel encouraged on the second day of our lessons when she said, “When will I be able to shift gracefully?”

After a couple of afternoons of driving around the back roads of our town it was clear that she had mastered the basics. Since my step-daughter was living in Northampton and going to school and working at UMass, she was going to need to be able to drive through the center of Northampton and down Route 9— a street full of stoplights and traffic. Since our next step was to drive in traffic, we started at the university. Cara got in, started the car and pulled out of the parking lot and stopped at the first traffic light. When the light turned green, she stalled. And then she stalled again. And then she stalled again. “It’s okay,” I said, waving the honking cars around us. “You’re okay, keep trying.” Finally she got the car going and we came up to the next light and stopped. The light turned green and she stalled. And then she stalled again. And then she stalled again. Luckily we were near one of the university’s parking lot. “Pull into the lot,” I said as I again waved the honking cars around us. “I can’t do it,” she said. “You can,” I said. “You just need to practice.” We pulled into the lot and practiced stopping and starting in order to regain her confidence and then we went back onto the road.

I wish I could say everything went fine from then on. But it didn’t. She continued to stall at every light. “You’re thinking too much about what you’re doing,” I said and tried to distract her by turning on the radio and chatting about anything I could think of. “I can’t do this,” she said. “Everyone stalls,” I tried to reassure her. “You just need to practice. You just need to drive more.” But after I dropped her off and watched her drive away in my car, I was beginning to wonder if she was right. Maybe she couldn’t do this. What was the problem? She knew how to drive. She actually did know how to shift. She drove perfectly in the parking lot, and around the traffic-free roads of our small town. Why couldn’t she do it? What was wrong?

There was nothing wrong. Teaching Cara to drive a standard is a good reminder of what our writing students go through when faced with new rhetorical situations. Our students come into our first-year classrooms with years of writing experience. They have experience as writers. But like Cara’s experience behind the wheel, many of them have experienced writing specific kinds of things— particular forms of the essay, college application essays, reports, etc. When moving to a new unfamiliar writing situation, on the surface, our students’ writing appears to fall apart—their organization isn’t as focused and developed, their sentence structure falls apart, the word choice becomes a bit silted. It appears they have lost control over the skills they had previously mastered. They stall and they can’t seem to move forward. And, like Cara, they lose their confidence. And who doesn’t? Who doesn’t lose their confidence when faced with a situation they can’t immediately master?

Throughout the semester our students stall a great deal. Each unit presents a different writing situation that presents new challenges. Just as Cara had mastered shifting on our small town roads, and stop-and-go traffic presented a new challenge; each rhetorical situation presents a new complication for the students to work through. It is important to remember that they will work through these challenges. As teachers we need to give them the encouragement (remind them of what they are doing well) and the opportunity to keep writing. The more they write, the better they will get.

And we also need to get out of their way.

As we approached the deadline for when Cara would take possession of the standard shift car, I worried that she wasn’t ready. After our not-so-great day of driving around the university, Cara’s willingness for our driving lessons began to fade. “I’m not sure she’s ready,” I told her father. “She’ll only get better by driving,” my husband said. “She knows how to shift. She just has to do it.”

My husband was right. A few days after Cara took possession of the standard shift car she appeared in my office with a plastic bag. “I drove from Northampton to Wal-Mart and then here and I didn’t stall once,” she said. “I knew you could do it!” I said. “Here,” she said giving me the plastic bag. “I don’t want Dad’s junk in my car.” I happily took the bag from her.

She had done it. It seemed that once I had shown her the basics, she needed to practice without me sitting in the passenger seat reminding her to put the clutch in, to slow down, to downshift.

And our students will do it too. Sometimes the best thing for our students is to send them home to revise and then to revise again. We can show them compelling introductions and tell them about the importance of not using the passive voice, but until they are alone with the page making those rhetorical choices for themselves they won’t completely get it.

So as my students move from “Inquiring into Self” to “Interacting with Texts” I try to keep in mind all these things I learned this summer from Cara—we all lose confidence when confronted with something new and challenging, we all need encouragement, sometimes we learn best by consistently doing it, and sometimes we need our teachers to get out of our way.

And grace comes with experience.

The other day Cara stopped by our house for a visit. When she got ready to leave, her father and I walked her out to the driveway. We watched as she gracefully backed her standard transmission car around and drove away.

The World Comes to Bartlett

Deirdre Vinyard is the Deputy Director of the UMass Writing Program. She teaches the first-year writing courses (College and Basic Writing) and directs the Basic Writing Program.

It’s the first day of class and students are doing the usual introductions. When Kensuke* introduces himself as an international student from Japan, Mitch, a freshman from Wrentham, brightens and tosses a couple of phrases in Japanese across the room to his new classmate. They both smile. The other students in the class look on with interest. There’s a touch of internationalization in my classroom. I know I am going to love this semester.

For the past two decades, American universities have actively worked to internationalize their campuses, and attracting students from around the world is a big part of this process. UMass recognizes the importance of providing its students with a global experience – through the curriculum, study abroad, and a diverse student body. The university is now actively recruiting international students, and this effort is starting to become apparent in our classes. This fall, UMass enrolled 120 new international undergraduate students, a twenty percent increase over enrollments from the previous fall. The change is palpable.
An increased number of international students is a positive change for the campus and the classroom. International students bring new perspectives and provide a window to the outside world for the rest of us here in Western Massachusetts. It is said so often that it has become a cliché, but our students are preparing to work in a very small world. When I was going to college in the 1970s, those of us who wanted to have an international component in our careers majored in foreign languages. Today, every field has a global element, from engineering to business to the hard sciences, and having an opportunity to live and study and play with peers from around the world is an important part of the preparation for this.

Our writing classes, always a place for collaborative learning, are wonderful spaces where students learn from each other. The more diverse the makeup of the students, the more possibility for engaging exchange. During the first week of classes when my students shared moments of their writing histories, they commiserated on the toil of the MCAS prep-class, recalled with pleasure writing in diaries, remembered writing song lyrics for a junior-high band. But this year they also shared memories of learning to write with Japanese kanji and of making the transition to writing in a second language. Or a third. Or, in the case of one student, a fourth.

Now in the fifth week of class, my students seem less surprised by the wealth of world experience they represent than they did the first day—in fact now they expect to find it. And it’s more than Mitch seeking affirmation from Kensuke on a Japanese phrase. Yesterday when we talked about the range of literature required in school curricula, we had examples from high schools in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey as well as examples from a high school in Seoul and one in Mumbai. When this happens in a class discussion, the world of my students gets a little bit bigger, and I think this has to be a good thing. The world, at least a little bit of it, has come to Bartlett.

*Student names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

Do We Have to Be in the Same Room?

Anne Bello is a PhD candidate in Rhet/Comp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is currently the Technology Coordinator of the UMass Writing Program where she also teaches College and Basic Writing. She is also a former member of the Writing Program’s Resource Center.

In the “Teaching with Technology” practicum, one issue some instructors brought up is marking student work. If, say, a student hands in a paper copy of a homework assignment, the instructor can easily mark the assignment with a check and hand it back to the student. It’s clear to the student that the instructor has read and acknowledged the work – even if the instructor just glanced over the work to see if it was done. With submitting work online, this process can become murkier. If instructors don’t write extensive comments, students might not know for sure whether the instructor read their work or not.

Fortunately, there are ways to work around this situation. Moodle, for instance, has a number of features that make it easy to “mark” student work. One option is to set a grading scale for an assignment or create a custom grading scale to quickly mark submissions as received (or satisfactory or whatever scale you’d like to use). Choosing the Quick Feedback option can make this process even easier. Another option is to create a checklist. If you want to acknowledge student work, you can set up the checklist so you update it; if you want to put more responsibility on the students, you can set it up so that they update it. Moodle can update it automatically as well. Of course, there are always low-tech solutions. For instance, you can refer to what students wrote for homework in class, making it clear you read their work.

While teachers have many options for acknowledging student work, there are some larger issues at play. How much marking and responding to texts do we, as teachers, need to do to help students learn? Is it enough for students to do an assignment and learn from the experience, or are we obliged to respond in some way? How can we encourage students to value the work they do independent of our feedback? When I first started teaching, I thought I needed to respond to everything: drafts, homework, in-class writing, etc. I’m at a point now where I mostly just comment on drafts, though I still feel a need to mark most of the work my students do. When I taught College Writing, I had students submit every piece of writing they did in class or for homework as part of a portfolio. I didn’t grade or comment on most of it, but the completeness of the portfolio was part of the grade. Since I’ve started teaching Basic Writing, I’ve moved away from this method. While I have my students submit some in-class writing online (we’re in a computer lab), there are some activities they don’t submit at all. I wonder if the students value the work I don’t collect as much as the work I do mark, but to be honest, it’s a relief not to have to sort through it all. And the fact is there are some writing assignments I don’t value as much. As long as they serve their immediate purpose – giving students something to think about and say in a discussion, for example – that’s enough.

Another issue involved in all of this is the degree to which learning needs to be an exchange between teacher and student. The other day I was conferencing with a student, and he had one of those “aha” moments that make teaching feel so worthwhile. This student had been rather dismissive of the class, acting as if he already knew everything there is to know about writing. Through our discussion of his draft, he finally seemed to get that global revision meant more than just fixing errors. It was as if he suddenly realized, “Oh – this isn’t high school. College-level writing is a lot of work. College is a lot of work.” After the conference, I congratulated myself on helping this student reach a more complex understanding of writing. There’s been a lot of coverage in the press of massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are often held up as a new future for higher education. As I left my office, I thought, “Oh yeah, online learning? Let’s see you do what we just did here! There’s no way the Interwebs can replace me.”

Later, though, I thought about my other students. At some point over the past few weeks, most of them have probably realized, “College is not like high school.” For some, this realization might have come in my course or another class. For others, it may have come while they were talking with friends at the dining commons or working alone in the dorms. I just happened to be in the room when this particular student had his realization. I might have helped, but this student would have probably learned the same thing another way.

The incident reminded me of something my undergraduate advisor once told me: He thought the most important learning took place as a student was reading on her own, seeing connections and disjunctions between different ideas and her understanding of the world. A professor might only get a glimpse of that learning, he said. And that was okay.

His vision of teaching and learning is appealing to me, but it’s also hard to buy into completely. He saw the careful selection of readings as being an important element of his teaching, even though his effort might be less tangible to students than the comments he wrote on their drafts. He had tenure, and he also had years of experience giving him the confidence that his students would learn whether he put check marks on their papers or not. As a grad student with only a few years of teaching experience, it’s harder to feel so secure.

I’d be interested to know how other teachers feel about acknowledging work. What do you choose to respond to and why? What don’t you collect? I’m especially interested in what it’s like to teach an online course, when you’re never “in the room.” Do you get the same kind of sense of student learning that you do in a face-to-face teaching situation?

Awkward Beginnings

The beginning of the semester has a sense of excitement to it. There is a newness to the fall semester, a sense of anticipation about what is going to happen.  This isn’t just the beginning of a semester, but the start of a new academic year. And for our first-year college writing students this is the beginning of their college careers. They are excited to begin and I am too. I’m excited to get underway.

 But there also seems to be an awkwardness to the beginning of the semester. I would say that my first couple of classes were fine. The students were there, with their notebooks, ready to go. But there were some uncomfortable silences as well. I did a lot of talking those first few days—more than I usually like to do in a writing class. I talked about the rhetorical situation, the importance of revision, and about how writing leads to discovery. I talked a lot about the things we were going to do over the course of the semester.  And my students sat listening to me talk more than I’m sure they would have liked. I’m really not that dynamic of a speaker. On both of our parts there was a lot of hesitation. When I said “Any questions?” I could see them wondering if they really should ask what was confusing or unclear. When I asked a question I could see some of them hesitate before raising their hands, unsure if what they had to say would be the “right” answer. I found myself also hesitating, unsure how far to push them, unsure how long to let the silences go.   

But this is okay. With newness there also comes awkwardness. The students and I are getting to know one another. As students new to academic life, they are unsure how to be in a classroom with a teacher they don’t know, with classmates they don’t know. They are figuring out who I am, what my expectations are, if I really mean what I say about the importance of taking risks.

I’m also getting to know them, trying to figure out how long it will take them to do peer review, how long they need to do a freewrite, what knowledge and interests they are bringing into the classroom. I’m trying to figure out if they will be a quiet class or a talkative class, how long will it take them to do any given exercise and activity.

It takes time to get to know one another.

This weekend I read through the first drafts of their first papers. I was looking forward to reading these drafts because I knew through their writing I would begin to get to know each of the students in my class a bit better. And I wasn’t disappointed. Through their writing I began to see them as individual writers with fascinating things to say. As I wrote my responses to their drafts, I found myself hoping they would know that I truly am interested in what they have to say and want to help them progress as writers.

But as I was sitting at my desk this weekend reading through these first drafts, I realized something else. These drafts are the real start of the semester. Telling students how to write is not the same as putting them in motion. And now that we are engaged in the process of generating writing, drafting, responding, and revising the awkwardness of the first couple of weeks is fading away.

Facing the Blank Screen

It is the end of the semester! Yahoo! And although the conversation I have with everyone I meet on campus this week is “I can’t believe the semester is over already! It went by so fast!” January does seem a long time ago. I began this blog at the beginning of the semester with the intent of posting an entry a week. With the help of some guest bloggers (Thanks Mark, Kate, and Deirdre!), I have met that goal. In January I didn’t think writing a post a week would be too difficult. I’m a writer, I like to write, and I have a lot to say. As the semester moved along I began to joke that I didn’t realize what a demanding pace writing a weekly blog was. It wasn’t really a joke.  My plan in January was to write my post early in the week so I would have plenty of time for drafting, thinking, crafting sentences, revising. However around mid-semester I found myself starting my weekly posts closer and closer to the deadline and therefore condensing this writing process.  Regardless of a few stressful nights, I’m not sorry I took on this task and plan to continue—well maybe with the help of a few more guest bloggers. But I’ve learned some things this semester by writing this blog, some things I will take with me into the College Writing classroom in September. 

 Here is what I’ve learned:

 1)     Facing a blank screen /page every week can be daunting.

 2)     Despite the best intentions, things like other work priorities & life obligations can and do get in the way. 

 3)     I don’t always write the best I can.

 4)     I don’t always practice what I teach.

 5)     Sustained weekly writing does make me a better writer. 

 Understanding all this may not make me a better writing teacher in September, but it will help me be more empathic towards my students and hopefully more humble in the classroom.

 

 

Pen and Trowel

This past weekend we were lucky to have Monday off due to the Patriots Day Holiday and the weather was great. I was able to get outside and start working in my garden. I raked oak leaves, cut away last summer’s plant stalks, and picked up dead branches. I like having a garden for all the usual reasons—the flowers, it’s nice to grow things, a garden makes my yard look better. But having a garden also helps me to better understand the writing process and teaching. Now I know this isn’t anything new. The garden as a writing metaphor is common, and the garden as a teaching metaphor is, well, cliche. But, I’m talking about something different here.

First I need to make two things clear.
1. I love to write. Really—I’m not just saying this because I’m a writing teacher. I love to write. I love working on a piece of writing—working on sentences, working out the structure, revising. I love being absorbed in a writing project. My favorite part of the summer is that each morning after I walk my dogs by the lake, I can go into my study and work out a narrative problem in my novel.

2. I don’t really like working in my garden. I know I should work in my garden. I know I should be out there everyday weeding, moving plants around, cutting things back, watering, fertilizing, dead-heading, spreading mulch. I know my garden would look better if I did all these things, but I tend to procrastinate and avoid getting out there to do what needs to be done. I’m always happy once I’ve made myself weed because the garden does look better, but I must admit working in the garden is something I usually have to force myself to do.

So what I’ve come to realize is that I like having a garden more than I like working in the garden. It is this realization that helps me better understand writing and my teaching.

I think it’s safe to say that most people don’t like writing and most of these people are in my required first-year writing class. Granted I’ll get a student or two who loves writing, but most of the students in my class don’t like to write. I hope this doesn’t sounds too critical or mean. But it’s a fact and I know it’s a fact because most of my students are up front about how they feel about writing, reading and English classes in general. “I never liked English classes,” they will say. “I don’t like writing and I don’t like to read,” they will confess to me in my office. “No offensive, Professor Woods, but I dreaded taking this class.” I like that my students feel they can be honest with me.

I think I’m like most people. Because I love something it can be difficult for me to imagine that other people don’t like what I love. I’m still shocked when people (students and non-students) tell me they don’t like to read. Really? I think to myself. How can anyone really not like to read? My students are also very willing to point this out. “You don’t understand,” they will say.“You’ve always been a good writer because you love to write.” Well they’re wrong about the part that I’ve always been a good writer, but they’re right that I have always loved writing. It’s because I love to write that I work at it and want to get better.

But I think they are right that I always don’t quite understand why they don’t spend hours and hours thinking about their essays. It is gardening that helps me understand what they are saying. Just like I want to have a garden, but not too keen on the process of getting a beautiful garden, my students want to have an essay, but aren’t too keen on the process of writing it. To put it simply, I like having gardened; my students like having written.

Early Morning Musings: Teaching at 8:00 AM by Deirdre Vinyard

Deirdre Vinyard is the Deputy Director of the UMass Writing Program. She teaches the first-year writing courses (College and Basic Writing) and directs the Basic Writing Program.

Ok, I’ll admit it. When I ended up teaching a section of Basic Writing last spring semester at 8:00 AM, I hadn’t actually requested that early hour. After I had assigned all the Basic Writing sections based on teacher preferences, the one section left over was at 8:00 AM. A little resentful, I took it and vowed to avoid scheduling classes this early in the future. I was sure that my students would come to class late, or worse, comatose, and that I would be fighting with them all semester about my attendance and late policies. The class I taught was one of five sections of Basic Writing that semester, so the students had little choice, and I thought they would be annoyed about the time. I also feared that discussion would languish at that time of the day, with everyone’s system just barely waking up by the end of class. I pictured myself lugging an espresso machine to my classroom on the first floor of Bartlett just to get through the semester.

The first day of class, I took an extra early bus, to make sure that I arrived on time. That winter (remember winter?) was cold and bright with snow. The sky was still a bit dark as I boarded that Amherst-bound bus in mid January. As we rounded the corner onto Massachusetts Avenue to the UMass campus, the morning sun was just coming into full form, lighting up piles of hard, white snow. It had begun, my 8 AM semester.

I arrived at class that first day prepared to wait for my students, sure they would drag in late. To my surprise, more than half of my students got to class at least 10 minutes early. An even greater surprise was that about half my students consistently arrived at class earlier than I did. As the semester progressed, they took the time before class to chat, listen to songs on each other’s I-pods and amuse each other with tales of dorm life. I found out at the end of the semester that three of them had taken to going to breakfast together after each class. I had assumed that my students would be mute with fatigue. They were anything but.

As the semester progressed and the sky at the bus stop each morning grew lighter, the students in my 8 AM class continued to get to know each other. A few snuck in late on occasion (I did have to talk to one student about lateness) but in truth, my students were tardy no more often than they were when I taught at 11:15 (a time considered very much before his preferred rising time for one of my students that semester). So my fears about the perils of the eight o’clock class were allayed.

But then I realized that something else had happened, having nothing to do with my students. My teaching was over by 9:30, leaving me the rest of the day to work on other things. I find that even though I have been teaching for a long, long time, I still mentally prepare for my class a little bit up until the time I teach. By finishing so early, I felt that I was more focused on my other work (and had longer stretches of time to do it).

So this spring I opted for another 8 AM class, this time a section of College Writing. To my surprise, the section filled up very quickly in the registration period, a sign that students were truly looking for an early class—since many sections of College Writing later in the day filled after my 8 AM section was full. This semester, I have almost no lateness. I have not had to reprimand my class or any of my students individually even once. In talking to my students, I have found that they have a number of reasons for wanting to have an early class. Four of them are on UMass teams and have practice later in the day. Two of my students are roommates and wanted to merge their schedules to make getting up and out of the room a collaborative effort. I even have one student this semester who took my 8 AM class in Spring 2011—clearly a fan of the early morning sky.

I recognize that problems can arise from teaching at 8, particularly if the students have little choice in registration. As I said, the students in my Basic Writing class had only five sections to pick from, and I did have to speak a few times about lateness. I think the 8 AM choice works better for College Writing since students have over a hundred options.

Given the boost to my work schedule (and the nice surprise that I do not face a pile of slumbering bodies twice a week), I am definitely going to go for the early morning class next time I teach College Writing. (I’m even beginning to feel a little nostalgic for the cool light coming from a January sky in the early hours before class.)